The subject matter disclosed herein relates to ultrasound imaging techniques, and more particularly, to software-based image reconstruction techniques.
Medical diagnostic ultrasound is an imaging modality that employs ultrasound waves to probe the acoustic properties of the body of a patient and produce a corresponding image. Generation of sound wave pulses and detection of returning echoes is typically accomplished by an ultrasound probe having an array of transducers. Such transducers typically include electromechanical elements capable of converting electrical energy into mechanical energy for transmission of ultrasonic waves into patient tissue and mechanical energy back into electrical energy when the reflected ultrasonic waves reach the transducers.
Real-time three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound is a type of imaging modality that involves transmitting ultrasonic acoustic waves into a 3D volume and reconstructing the measured echoes to display a two-dimensional (2D) rendering of the 3D reflectivity distribution of the volume. Transmitting the ultrasonic waves to a scanned volume may involve directing a transducer array to transmit ultrasonic waves in the scanned volume (e.g., a volume in a patient's body). The ultrasonic waves reflected by the scanned volume may be received by an ultrasound probe, digitized, formed into beams, and voxelized, or converted into electrical data in the form of voxels (i.e., volumetric pixels), by subsequent processing involving various electronic components. Typically, the 3D set of voxels may be processed to display the scanned volume as either multiple 2D planes or as a pseudo-shaded projection image, which may be a shaded 2D image of a plane in the scanned volume. The pseudo-shaded projection image may also be referred to as a 2.5D projection.
Some limitations in generating real-time projection images in 3D ultrasound projections may include acoustic acquisition time and the time associated with image reconstruction. For example, to display an image based on a scanned 3D volume, typical reconstruction approaches may convert element data into a 3D matrix of millions of voxels. Additionally, image reconstruction algorithms may be applied to each of the millions of voxels to correlate each voxel with a visual attribute (e.g., color, opacity, gradient). Generally, such methods may be performed to generate the pseudo-shaded projection image.